Redistricting Ruling: An Unbiased Look - 5/01/2026

追加: 2026-05-08

[00:00:04]Bonapetit y'all. If you think this is one serious serving of tiramisu, and it is, wait till you see what it's only a small part of. On Sunday, more than 100 Italian pastry chefs gathered in London.

[00:00:16]Their goal? Well, you could probably guess it by watching the time lapse. It goes on for a while. This is what you get when you combine 3,000 eggs, more than two tons of mascar pony, and 50,000 lady fingers or Naples biscuits or sponge fingers or savoyardi biscuits, whatever you call these things. Give dozens of chefs 2 days to work on it and then 5 hours to put it all together and voila, you have the new Guinness World Record for the longest tiramisu. The previous title holder for this was 897 ft long, but that's a comparative titty portion. This masterpiece of mascar pony measured a mighty milestone of 1445 ft long and it gave everyone who worked on it their just desserts.

[00:01:09]I'm Carl Isus for the world from A to Z where Fridays are awesome. Our nonpartisan coverage now looks at a recent US Supreme Court ruling that's especially significant in an election year when both Democrats and Republicans are looking for ways to get an advantage in this November's midterm elections.

[00:01:26]So, what's the ruling? On Wednesday, the High Court determined that a voting district in Louisiana was unconstitutional. Most of the people in the district are black and the court ruled six to3 that because race was the main factor in how the district map was drawn, it's illegal. Supporters of the ruling, including the majority of justices, said a major part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibits voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race and that that's just what the district did. But critics of the ruling, including the three justices who supported Louisiana's district, pointed to another part of the Voting Rights Act that aims to protect minority groups from having their voting power diluted or reduced. They say state lawmakers could now draw new voting districts that do just that, as long as they say it's for political reasons and not based on race. What's interesting here is that both sides are accusing each other of gerrymandering, redrawing voting maps to give themselves an advantage in elections. Critics of the Louisiana district say it was gerrymandered to unfairly favor minority voters. Critics of the ruling against it say it'll lead to gerrymandering that'll unfairly hurt minority voters. And this is going on just months from midterms in which every seat in the US House and about a third of those in the Senate are up for election.

[00:02:46]Up next, during the spring storm season in the US, a harrowing rescue in Texas is a reminder of the dangers of flood waters and the bravery of first responders. STAY WHERE YOU'RE AT.

[00:02:56]>> A tense and technically challenging rescue situation amid raging flood waters forced Texas rescuers to get creative by getting jumper cables involved. Officers with the White Settlement Police Department responded to reports of a woman and three kids in a car trapped in rushing flood waters.

[00:03:12]Rescuers got the children to safety, but the woman was trapped in the front of the car, which was teetering toward the fast-moving waters.

[00:03:20]>> I need something to get wrapped around her.

[00:03:22]>> A quick-thinking officer grabbed a pair of jumper cables and used them as an improvised lifeline, instructing the woman to anchor herself with the cables in case she was swept away. Fire officials soon arrived and pulled the vehicle back from the brink, and all four family members were brought to safety and unharmed.

[00:03:40]Ah, word of knowledge. What was the pity black which was proposed by a Britain named Roland Hill and introduced on this date in 1840? Ferris wheel, toy doll, postage stamp, CAB SERVICE issued in Britain costing a penny and made with black ink. The penny black was the world's first poster stamp.

[00:04:13]On this date in world history, all aboard, Amtrak began operating across the US on May 1st, 1971. The railway company, which receives some funding from the federal government, took over inner city rail services, which had been shared by private companies. Amtrak now serves over 500 cities in 46 states and the District of Columbia. Octung, baby. The U2 incident began on May 1st, 1960, but had nothing to do with the band. Cold War tensions flared when the Soviet Union shot down an American spy plane in Soviet airspace and captured pilot Gary Powers, who' ejected. Proof of US reconnaissance missions over the Soviet Union led to the collapse of an international conference involving the two countries and others. Powers was convicted of spying, but was freed by the Soviet Union in a prisoner swap with the US in 1962.

[00:05:08]And New York's Empire State Building was dedicated on this date. In 1931, President Herbert Hoover turned on the building's lights from his desk in the White House. The 102story art deco building was the tallest in the world at that time.

[00:05:24]>> Are these the same color? A simple question and for most of the world the answer is an easy no. But if you speak one of these languages, these shirts might be considered the same color. For decades, linguists have tried to figure out how and if spoken language affects our perception of color. Theories in the 1900s proposed that vocabulary actually dictates what our eyes can see. Those ideas were largely based off of ancient historical texts like the Odyssey where Homer compares the sea to the color of wine. Many ancient languages, including Greek, had a limited color vocabulary and no word for blue. Some linguists think this language gap forced people to compare things to what they did know.

[00:06:10]That's why the water might have looked more red to ancient Greek speakers.

[00:06:15]Researchers were intrigued. In the decades that followed, they found that almost every modern language has words for naturally prominent colors like black, white, red, and yellow. But some languages had dozens more of what are called basic color terms, names for shades viewed as their own unique color.

[00:06:37]For example, in some languages, light blue and dark blue are basic colors.

[00:06:42]They're not viewed as different shades, but as their own color category, similar to how English speakers might view red and orange now. The theory that language limits what we see was spurred on in the 1960s when a linguistic study found that speakers whose language uses the same word for green and blue were less likely to notice a difference between those shades than English speakers. It seemingly proved that if your language has more basic color words, you see color differences better. But many linguists later denounced the methods and results of that study. And additional research found that when speakers were given color words that their language didn't already have, they were able to differentiate shades as well as other groups, just slightly slower. It's not that people couldn't see a difference. They just needed the right words to communicate it.

[00:07:41]>> The request a shout out button is only a click away at world az.org. That's where we heard from Mrs. Nicholson's class.

[00:07:48]The Bulldogs are online at Barendo Middle School in Roswell, New Mexico.

[00:07:52]Next up, Carson City, Nevada, where we've elected the senators of Carson High School and Mr. Hogan's class. From the mountain state of West Virginia, want to thank Mr. Phillips class for watching from Augusta at JM Chick Buckby Juvenile Center and the Pandas of Child Play School in Jefferson, Indiana, where Mrs. Cruz and Miss Jackson students are round out our fantastic for Friday.

[00:08:21]Where in the world? This is one of the European nations that border the North Sea. It got its independence from the Netherlands in 1830. It has three official languages, though only Dutch and French are widely spoken here.

[00:08:37]This is Belgium, a nation of almost 12 million whose capital is Brussels.

[00:08:47]Capping off a week that started with a pig squealing competition in Estonia, we bring you a much higher pitched event from a north seaside town of Belgium.

[00:08:59]It's kind of obvious what these creatures were gulling for on Sunday, and many of them even dressed the part.

[00:09:06]One participant said this had always been a useless trick, but that now is her time to shine. The seagull screeching championship reportedly attracted more than 70 participants from 15 countries. The winning prize, bragging rights, which some would say is for the birds. I mean, it seems kind of unbelievable and takes a lot of gold to have people flock from all over the map and not give him a cracker, a few scraps, or even a sand dollar. Isn't it a little awkward after so many turns that no one's able to skimmer from the proceeds and fly home with a few clams or at least a copy of Jonathan Livingston? I'm Carl Isus wrapping up another week on the world from A to Z. You mean the world to me.

[00:09:42]Have a wonderful weekend ahead.

[00:09:57]Where?

[00:10:16]Heat. Heat.